The New York Times published today my column Investing in Good Governance. The column discusses a study by Alma Cohen, Charles Wang, and myself about the correlation between governance and returns. The study, Learning and the Disappearing Association between Governance and Returns, forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics, is available here.
Earlier research has shown that, during the 1990s, trading strategies based on the Governance Index (Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick (2003)) and the Entrenchment Index (Bebchuk, Cohen, and Ferrell (2009)) would have produced abnormally high returns in the 1990s. Our study shows that the correlation between governance and stock returns in the 1990s did not subsequently persist. The study also provides evidence that both the correlation in the 1990s and its subsequent disappearance were due to market participants’ gradually learning to appreciate the difference between firms scoring well and poorly on the governance indices. Finally, the study establishes that, although the governance indexes could no longer generate abnormal returns in the 2000s, their negative association with operating performance and firm value persists. After discussing these findings, the DealBook column comments on whether there are any ways left for investors to make money from governance.
The DealBook column is available here.